Tuesday, November 13, 2012

I thought I should share my rather fuzzy development plan for Dweller for the coming few months. The plan is fuzzy because I find myself more and more unsure of what to do to improve Dweller further. I'm sure there's a ton of things I could do, but I've worked on Dweller for so long and that makes it hard to look at the game with fresh eyes (like a player who discovers Dweller for the first time). I've never meant for Dweller to be anything but a hobby project where I can experiment with different coding practices, technologies, platforms and have fun coding. At the same time it is pretty obvious that the average Android users expects a hell of a lot more of a game today than only one or two years ago. Anything less than a triple A title and you're required to be either very innovative to get player attention or be content with a much smaller group of brilliant gamers who can see beyond pretty pictures and enjoy a game because of other merits. You guys who are reading this are among the latter group, and I love you for it, but that doesn't mean I can't have at least a little bit of both, does it?

This is why at least part of my plans for the winter are about polishing the game in such a way to make it more attractive to "the masses". So, without further ado, here's the plan:

Add an intro screen. I'd like to have some pretty pictures to give a good first impression.

Improve the death/win screen. Currently it's something of an anti-climax to beat the game.

Add music and sound (at least for Android and desktop version, most likely not for J2ME). I'm in touch with a composer who is working on music for Dweller.

Improve rendering performance by switching to OpenGL using libgdx or similar. Tablet performance is total crap at the moment and low-end Android devices are also starting to struggle. Switching to hardware accelerated rendering will increase performance significantly.

Add player perks. I'd like to see something similar to talent trees (as seen in WoW, Torchlight, Diablo etc). It's going to be hard to balance, but I'd really like to allow the player to within each class come up with different kinds of character builds supported by talents/perks.

Add more dungeon variation with rare rooms, encounters and items.

I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts on the focus of Dweller in the months to come. In the words of House Stark, "Winter is coming", and I'd like to have a solid plan backed by the community to get it all done.

#553 Remove teleport traps from the labyrinth #554 Unique monsters/bosses should ignore hidden traps #555 Make sure that banishing a previously summoned ally when trying to summon it again never fails #556 Adjust message sequence to show trigger message before damage message when moving to a cell with a trap #557 Remove duplicate "You miss" message when the player misses a target #558 Periodic effects such as poison should trigger on any action, not just movement #559 Items that recharge when an enemy is killed should not have to be equipped to be recharged #560 Adjust delay of stun effect to be half the time it takes for the stunned creature to make a move #561 Make sure to not change position of an item in a quickslot if it is enchanted or recharged #552 Fix broken room where items can sometimes be generated in walls #544 Fix problem with item on the ground being destroyed when receiving a quest reward #531 Being disarmed while all neighboring tiles are filled with items should not destroy the dropped weapon #564 Player box does not properly update at all times #565 Chest traps should not prevent the player from opening chest using targeting mode #566 It should be possible to see if an item is in a quickslot from the inventory list

Dweller

Dweller is a fantasy roguelike for Java enabled cellphones. A version for desktop computers also exist, but the main focus of development is for mobile platforms. Dweller is designed to run on any MIDP2 or Android OS 1.5+ enabled handset.

Dweller is free to download and play, but it is also a one-man effort to bring a full featured roguelike to cellphones and other mobile devices. If you like the game please consider sending a donation: